True... One of the biggest reasons why I did this to my car was that I wanted to be able to incorporate MP3s and movies into it, but also have navigation as a MUST. Unfortunately, as you say, there is no linux software that supports navigation as accurate as say some of the Windows software out. Not to mention that most of the software developed especially for use inside a vehicle is all windows based anyhow.

I bit the bullet and *gasp* run XP for it... Let the Microsoft flaming ensue...

Screw cars... think supercomputing cluster. VIA have been talking about a dual CPU mini-itx board with 2ghz (esther core) processors for a while now. I'll leave finding info about them up to you (mini-itx.com and via's site for starters)

You can get 1U cases which let you put in 2 mini-itx boards (there are quite a few if you [g|fr]oogle.

Here are some specs for a rack full of them...336GHz total power. 84GB RAM, up to 22.5 TB HDD space, total power usage < 15kW (60W per machine).

that's a spicy-a meat-a-ball.. still 22TB and 336Ghz cluster... hmmmm... Might get 5fps on Doom 3!

15kW/hTo be extra geeky... cost per day to run in London, England (electricity only, excluding air conditioning)...15kW/h per hour * 24 = 360kW/h per day* 8p per unit + VAT = 2880 + 504= GBP 33.84 per day= GBP 12351.60 per year.... ouch, that's a new rack every 3 years if you leave it turned off though

Damn I cant wait for the 2ghz dual cpu mini-itx boards... and a bunch of rich, obscure relatives to pass on and give me money >:)

And since this is slashdot... cue the 50 posts to correct and nit pick this post since it contains (bad) maths.

Probably not a very efficient cluster for actually doing calculations on but it'd be great for prototyping. I could see having the head node segmenting it off into a number of smaller clusters be a useful approach for teaching purposes.

I get mine exclusivley from ebay. Just try to get a real new one with guarantee. Never had any issues. I really like the Epias and I'm still trying to convince my mom to let me build a sleak Epia based Linuxbox for her. Somehow she still thinks those things are expensive. Well, I can't blame her really, she never ever paid a single dime for a PC. All she ever uses is my last generation hardware.;-)

Forget mini-itx, I want to know when Nano-ITX [mini-itx.com] will be availible... I get the distinct feeling that it's a vaporvare promo trick... it's only 2/3 of the size of the mini-itx boards and 10x as useful/easy to put into things.... I want one:(

The only problem is they HAVE NO PCI SLOT! There is a miniPCI slot, but what's that good for? I want a miniPCI TV Tuner so I can make a tiny PVR. I found one here [lifeview.com.tw] , but it looks like vapor.

I can go USB, but USB tuners have a reputation for sucking.

And now VIA is pushing a new Grace platform that is supposed to be even SMALLER than nano-itx...

Quite a few places. In Europe linitx.com. There are a few places in the US as well.

In btw, I may be mistaken, but I have some questions about the reality of the article as well as the integrity of the journalist who wrote it. The picture looks suspiciously like MII, probably the 600MHz version with the heatsink taken off the Eden on it. It has PCMCIA and cardbus and is C3 based. It is not the C5 motherboard described in the article.

The FPU is a little better now. It runs at full CPU speed instead of half like the earlier C3's. It's still underpowered though. Sudhian has a review of the last generation MII 12000 here [sudhian.com]. The 1.2Ghz w/o hardware MPEG4 acceleration can't play 720x540 DIVX file smoothly. If the hardware MPEG4 works, 1.3Ghz should be fast enough for any home theater PC job except video encoding like recording TV. You'll need a TV tuner card with a hardware MPEG encoder.

While it is true that the FPU of the C3 still isn't up to speed with other processors, the C3 1Ghz can definatly play 720x540 MPEG4 back at full speed. I do it all the time with a CVS copy of MPlayer (DirectFB driver) on Slackware Linux. I can even play 720x460 WMV9 (windows binary DLL) with 80% cpu utilization. For comparison, libavcodec decodes 640x480 MPEG4 with only 32% CPU utilization, with 14% going to dealing with the framebuffer (not decoding, just frame copying or vsyncing).

The EPIA-800... it is okay I suppose, it does what I'm using it for quite well (KDE on FreeBSD for work purposes, e-mail, light web browsing, SSH, etc). It suffers from being a first-gen product, the chipset is weak, and so on.

A 1.3GHz CN400 based board will be a lot more powerful, and should be more than enough for media applications that these boards are ideally suited for.

I remember spotting a computer, probably a link off of LinuxDevices [linuxdevices.com], that was the size of a credit card. It was mostly SMT solder-down components with a mini-PCI-like card connector at one end that was used to connect to a daughtercard full of ports and whatnot. I went looking for it yesterday, but couln't find it. Any ideas? I wanted to imagine a Beowulf cluster of them, but needed a visual reference for aid.

...I really missed DVI or some other HDTV res output. I mean, what I want to use it for is a home theater kind of setup (with network disks, of course)... The Nanode [nanode.com] + an LCD TV... now that would be cool.

The latest C3 processor features an integrated AES encryption engine and two random number generators that work with the PadLock ACE software to perform user authentication, DRM, or other security operations in the background

...no, it's not Palladium/Trusted Computing etc. Basicly, what it has is an encryption accelerator, just like it has mpeg2, mpeg4 etc. acceleration. Why? Because the processor itself is a whimp.

It doesn't do anything else than what a plain 3GHz machine could do. DRM is one *application*, since most DRM'd content is also encrypted;). But it might just as well be used to run heavy SSH connections or your encrypted P2P net of choice.

I thought about getting one of the older ones, and my local place can order them in if you ask... try this with your local store. It's not worth hunting around online for a better price when shipping will eat the advantage many times over. With more expensive parts, it can be worth it but these things are cheap.

I imagine I'll get one when there's dual-NIC version. They're pretty tough to beat for firewalling. There's cheaper and lower power systems in existance, but you usually sacrifice quite a bit.

There is an older dual-nic version, theVIA EPIA CL-Series [linuxdevices.com]. It's only 600mhz but that's lots faster than the old compaq deskpro that i'm currently using for a firewall. I'm planning on upgrading to one of these in this [big008.com] or a similar case.

From what I've read, lots of people are using this motherboard for just this purpose.

Right, but I'd prefer the new one as it has SATA on board. It's also a bit faster, more memory bandwidth, etc. I'd be using it to host dynamic content and as a file server as well. When they get a dual NIC version of the new one, I'll be able to build the server I want with no PCI cards, which is what I'd prefer to do.
I'm not going to replace my aging system now when I can wait a little bit longer and get a system that does everything I want without any upgrades.

If you only want to create a low-power firewall, take a look at the Soekris boxes [soekris.com], which are designed to run FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Some models have three (3) lan ports, as well as (optional) PCMCIA slots (for wireless LAN applications). Most versions boot from compact flash (or a microdrive), but there's a version that supports a 2.5" IDE laptop drive (however, note that the optional case for the IDE drive version supposedly has poor ventilation, and so the drive supposedly runs hot -- see

Interesting, VIA is announcing yet more new products...
Yet, I've been looking for the past several weeks (and other posts on the Internet go as far back as Nov of 2003) for VIA's latest generation Athlon XP chipset KT880 via kt880 [via.com.tw]... yet other than VIAs website, it's nowhere to be seen!!!

Has anyone tried setting up a nice small PVR with any of these? If you put like a Hauppauge 250 or another hardware encoding card in this, is there enough power for recording and watching TV at the same time? How about VIA's graphics? I assume I wouldn't be able to play FarCry... but will it be adequate to display DVDs on a non HDTV?

...if you're an electrical engineer, no. The motherboard is probably reactive/inductive in some way, not purely resistive like a lightbulb. This means that the phase angle will be non-zero, and the true and apparent power of the circuit will be different.

...if you're talking about your electricity bill, then for all you could care, they're equal. 20W will be extremely close to 20W, regardless of what I said above. Personally I don't care much, since I live a place where most of the year have a space heater on...

It's not the motherboard that's "inductive" (although everything does have inductance, capaitance, etc). What matters here is the power supply itself. Most every pc power supply (I would say every one of them, but there's probably one or two out there that would prove this wrong) uses switching circuitry to chop down a "bulk" supply of 70-200VDC into something the computer can use. This "bulk supply" was, in the beginning, created by simply rectifying the AC line directly and dumping into a fat capacitor. M

I must agree with other posters: the VIA boards are most definitely the shit. And the older ones, like the V-8000A, are a steal. I currently have Fedora Core v1 + XMMS on mine; to make a long story short, lots of fun..

HOWEVER, do note that some VIA processors will advertise themselves as "686-compliant", when in fact their instruction set is missing 1 vital MMX instruction (SSE, I think). So do make sure your binaries are built for the 586. You'll thank me in the morning.

HOWEVER, do note that some VIA processors will advertise themselves as "686-compliant", when in fact their instruction set is missing 1 vital MMX instruction (SSE, I think). So do make sure your binaries are built for the 586. You'll thank me in the morning.

MMX is a set of integer vector operations, SSE is the same for floating point. Neither of these implies 686; Pentium Pro was the first processor with i686 core, and it has neither of these instruction sets.

To complicate matters further, GCC's idea of i686 seems a little different than the official spec (whatever that is). AFAIK, AMD's K6 processors are i686, but programs compiled with gcc for i686 won't run on it. I think it's about the CMOV instruction; please correct me if I'm wrong.

But this won't work on C3-2, the Nehemiah. It has SSE instead of the original C3's 3DNow. Thus I use -march=pentium3, which is fine instruction-wise. Timing and cache issues are another matter though...

I've got a nice VIA Epia board (C3 Nehemiah).The instruction in question is CMOV.To build for these machines with recent GCCs build with c3 as -march or -mcpu:) If you don't use a recent gcc compile with i586 instead - Mine supports MMX+SSE (it has two SSE pipes).

I have a few ideas for computer designs, one of which is for a mobile computer. I know you can get just about anything you need for a desktop system but, it there anything available that would allow someone to design and build his own, battery-powered, mobile computer "off-the-shelf"?

I've been wondering lately myself about this. Just how inexpensively can one put together a reasonably-useful yet reasonably-standard computer off-the-shelf? (As opposed to "go on E-bay and see if you can find X" or "if you can find THIS version of THIS hardware, you can hack it to put Linux in it" and so on...)

It'd be nifty to have some good sources for very inexpensive new low-power general-purpose computer hardware. I know I'm not the only perso

DRM support and control could be _the_ distinctive element between MOBO manufacturers. Most support and performance is similar enough that for good or bad Security/Corporate controls might be the biggest difference between mobo's.

Even radical differences like processor type and mobo size matter less to me than having my own control over my own computer.

At least read about DRM before you get all antsy about it. You don't have to use DRM even if your computer is DRM-compliant. You can turn it off whenever you want. Remember how the Pentium-ID was going to be the ultimate privacy-killer? Except you turn it off in the BIOS. Welcome to DRM - it's the same deal. Sheesh.

These are great. My home server is running on a
fanless EPIA 5000 [viavpsd.com] and I have never been happier about my choice. The whole machine cost me $300
(case, mobo, 256MB RAM, 120GB, extra NIC) over a
year ago and has been sitting quietly under the table in my living room ever since.

It is extremely quiet (only audible humming comes from two small fans on the case) which is important to me. It is also very low on energy consumption. I got an APC Back-UPS ES-350 [apc.com] (just a couple of days before the big black-out here, in North-East USA --- could not have been wiser:) The UPS is rated at 8 minutes under 100W load and 2 minutes under 200W but it lasts over 40 minutes powering my server and my DSL modem.

Another thing I am really happy about is the fact that VIA seems to be doing a good job supporting Linux. Personally, I have never had trouble running Red Hat on mine (although, I hear FC2 had issues with it that were only recently fixed --- but that was FC2's problem).

Overall, I feel that this has been a really great product and would wholeheartedly recommend it. I am also very happy to see that VIA has been constantly improving them. I am looking forward to seeing the upcoming nano-ITX boards.

The chip includes a "Chromotion Video Display Engine" with advanced video rendering functions such as "Video De-blocking" and "Adaptive De-interlacing," which add to the user's "Hi-Def visual experience," according to VIA. The board supports displays including all HDTV formats, and NTSC or PAL TVs.

This sounds interesting. Possibly handling the motion vectors and a deblocking filter in hardware. I wonder if this is the extent of the 'MPEG-4' support, or if that refers to a separate MPEG-4 hardware decdo

Yeah, somehow I don't see this puny 1.3ghz processor playing any of my 1080i.TS files anytime soon... My 2.6 has no problem at all, but my old 1.7 chokes on them.Having used the 933mhz C3 VIA and seeing it drop frames on anything bigger than 320x240 Xvid, I have my doubts about this HDTV claim...Also, I don't see a DVI or CV output on this thing, so am I to assume they want us to buy the seriously flawed ATI HDTV adapter for HDTV output?

Via was started in California, then moved to Taiwan, the notebook computer business HQ. Why hasn't any American (or Japanese, or German...) company threatened the Taiwanese lock on design leadership? Taiwan's economics might offer a longterm manufacturing edge in this industry, but what kind of competitive advantage do Taiwanese companies have in the innovation?

Duh...companies like Intel, compaq, and others are the ones that BUILT that infrastructure!

Via is an anomoly...they were cute when the big boy needed cheap chipsets to stick-it-to each other, but the took the profits and bought up the IP of the big guys loosers...now they are a serious theat in low-cost computing. Intel would love to stop them, but Via has bought enough of Intel's "victims" that intel had cross-licenses with that Via has some free-reign to do what they want!!!

As much as I dislike Via, I gotta admit that these mini boards are a home run -- the best thing to happen to PCs in a long time. I'm looking forward to Intel and/or AMD jumping on the bandwagon. And soon after that I hope to see even smaller stuff becoming popular, possibly even system-on-chip designs. How sweet would that be? Yeah, I know you can buy a single-chip system now, but I want one that's just (or almost) as powerful as my home PC. Integrated graphics, gigs of RAM, all running at several GHz. Forget laptops... put the whole thing in a PDA.:)

I have two of the EPIA 533 fanless machines. One is my mail/web server for the internet, the other is my NFS/web server for my home use. These things are awesome at only a measured 32W power consumption with everything running (hard drive included). This 32W is using old 3.5 inch hard drives and a case fan. I expect to have done better if I went with the 2.5 inch lower power hard drives and external power supply.

But what I find really amazing about all of this is that I got these little low power boxes and they are doing as much as many people dedicate on a 140W+ machine. There's really no need for that. If you find 533MHz too slow, then move up to a higher machine. But I was going for the silent/fanless models.

I can't claim to have the fastest set up in the world, but for 99.9% of you with a home mail/web server, you really don't need to run it on that big of a box. And for 32W of power, it makes for a cool summer.

In time, I think people will realize that the benefit of having a 3.2GHz mail server isn't that great. Sure, there might be exceptions and I might not survive a slashdot effect, but not many of us will.

I'm pretty sure that VIA is the *only* mini-itx vendor. Other motherboard manufacturers build smaller-than-ATX forms (micro-atx, flex-atx), I don't think anyone has built a Pentium or Athlon board in the same size.

Mini-ITX is nice, but I think VIA needs to come out with something that can compete with other Mini-ITX vendors using Pentium4, Pentium-M or Athlon.

First of all, VIA pretty much came up with the Mini-ITX idea, so it's the others that compete against VIA. The idea hinges on low power and ideally passive cooling; therefore putting a P4 or Athlon on such a mobo would be a dumb idea.

I remember seeing one review of a P4 Mini-ITX board, and it had a number of problems because the CPU and cooling system took u

The point is just about any operating system I know about has something that can be used as a boss key-Window M to minimize everything, Window-L to lock the workstation, even just CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager, and that's just the Windows OS. Heck, pop up a full-screen CLI when the boss comes around. Even on a break- what you look at is your business, not your boss's. Never leave anything on screen when the boss comes around- it's a

For those who do not follow the link, a library to use the mpeg decoder is available as a binary only file for certain distributions. Some may find this acceptable, others may not. If you are considering purchasing one, you need to make your own decision on what you consider acceptable.

VIA provides this shared library (libddmpeg.so) as a binary file for certain supported distributions. Although there are some attempts to reverse engineer the library, the source code is not available. So if you need to use this library you must use one of the supported distributions.

(Editor's note: The source code is available to large OEM customers under NDA/licensing agreements. It is not available to end-users.)

This is what I'm talking about. Linux users do NO ONE any favors when they adopt this sor

there are benchmarks all over, google for "via epia review" and you are sure to get some good ones. Anecdotally, they are plenty fast for basically everything but 3d games, multimedia creation, and viewing very highly compressed (mpeg4, high bitrate divx) video. This new board will hopefully change that. I've used one (an 800 mhz) as a desktop machine for a co-worker, and the only thing they commented on was how quiet and little it was compared to their old (p4) machine. They made no mention of a performance hit, and they work on the thing all day long. I've also used one (1 Ghz) as a firewall / server for my dad's business. And frankly, the poor thing is bored.

Flash works fine, even those silly animated shorts and games. Remember that a "slow as balls" computer by todays standards will likely meet their (your parents) needs just fine. The biggest benefit over a cheap athlon is that these can be made small and quiet, making them unobstrusive. They also run cool enough that they don't affect the temperature of the room they are in noticably, unlike athlons / P4 which in a lot of ways are very expensive space heaters....

I agree, they're fast enough for most tasks. As an experiment I moved all my work to a VIA Epia 533 Fanless motherboard (with 1 GB of RAM, which helps a lot) for three months. This is the slowest motherboard VIA sells, and I think the slowest on the market that's still in active sales as opposed to used/inventory sales. I ran both XP and Slackware 9 on the box.

CPU loading was idle most of the time. It was acceptable for email, web browsing, and word processing. There were a few places it bogged down: recalculating large spreadsheets, websites with Flash animated ads, printing, displaying PDFs (ghostview pretty much choked the system whenever it would run) and running compression (gzip tar backups would max out the load instantly.)

I upgraded to a fanless Pentium M ITX box because I could, but still use the VIAs for web/mail service, which work fine -- one box's uptime reached 240+ days before I needed to take it down for hardware maintenance.

They're not gaming systems or workstations, but otherwise completely acceptable for most uses -- and the fanless ones are pretty much silent (the loudest thing the VIA 533 PC was the hard disk seeking. Really.)

They're cool little machines, but we need to be putting more pressure on ALL these hardware companies to document their shit. Providing comprehensive documentation on the use of the hardwaer they spent so many man-years developing doesn't protect them from their competitors at all - it jsut lowers the value of their product. In this case, no matter how small it ain't worth it - I can get a (well supported linux compatible) matx card that's nea